


Order of Succession

by pellucid



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I need you to understand this, Lee," she says slowly. "Everything I have done since the day you and I met—<i>everything</i>—I have done for one reason only: to keep these people, my people, safe and alive. That is my measuring stick, and I think you will find it consistent."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Order of Succession

**Author's Note:**

> Missing scene for 4.16 "Deadlock." Usually I'd rather just deny the existence of season 4, especially the second half. But this is a little fix-it for a relationship that deserved that: an homage to these characters as they once were, or might have been. Beta by gabolange.
> 
> Written in April 2009.

Gaius Baltar wants to take command of civilian security on _Galactica_. Lee finds the proposition ludicrous, but the security situation is desperate enough that he's willing to give all ideas an airing. 

Lee watches Baltar petition his father, prevent him from leaving the room, appeal to the admiral's desire for a "human" solution to at least a few of _Galactica_ 's problems. If he were more dispassionate, Lee might admire Baltar's strategy, appealing to the weakest link of the group. But Lee cannot be dispassionate about this, and he bristles to see Baltar try to manipulate his father. He's learned how to hate his father and how to love him, but it hurts Lee too much to pity him.

He can't read Laura as she sits quietly, lips pursed and head shaking ever so slightly, perhaps in disagreement, or in rage, or in acquiescence, or simply in illness. She's "Laura" in his mind now, a shift he locates in the moment he stood with his hand poised over the airlock controls, his father's best friend standing inside. 

Her illness is worse by the day, and Lee is glad to take on extra responsibilities to help her. But he hates to see her weakened, hates to see her sitting silently while Lee and his father argue with Baltar. Lee feels a pang of regret as he imagines a healthy Laura presiding over this discussion, putting Baltar in his place and sweeping him out the door. She may be too weak for that now, but she's still the president. She has become "Laura" in his mind, but Lee will never call her anything but "Madam President" aloud. 

She has adopted an affectionate "Lee" for him of late, at least in private, which he vastly prefers to the late, condescending "Mr. Adama." He tries not to wish she'd call him "Captain Apollo"; he'll never be that person again.

Baltar finishes his outrageous request with a plaintive "please, Admiral," but it's Laura he turns to look at. Disdain is clear in her face, but there's something else that Lee struggles to identify—understanding, perhaps. She flicks her wrist slightly, and Baltar is dismissed. He leaves without argument, bidding each of them a good night.

"He's got a point?" his father says, his voice rising with uncertainty at the end.

"Mmm," Laura replies without commitment, her eyes narrowing. She rises from her chair with some effort; as she takes his father's arm, Lee can't tell who is supporting whom. She looks over her shoulder. "Give me a moment, Lee. I'll be back," she says before moving with his father into the other room.

He isn't yet used to this strange, familial intimacy, Laura at home in his father's space. He looks around the room at their mingled belongings: Laura's shoes kicked into a corner, her jacket thrown across the back of a chair. A framed photograph of Laura with Billy Keikeya sits on his father's desk.

Lee has spent countless hours in this space, but he never feels entirely comfortable here. It is his father's room, and now Laura's, and Lee is still negotiating his role: son, colleague, heir apparent. His impulse to break free of the claims they both hold on him is tempered by his fear at losing them. He wants to fix them, turn back time to reclaim Laura, still healthy and irrepressible in her sense of rightness, and his father, still a hero. Even after the end of the world, he took them for granted; he hadn't realized resenting them was a luxury. 

Lee pours a glass of water and listens to the muffled voices in the back of the cabin. He remembers the night months ago, a lifetime ago, when he and Dee were to have dinner with his father and Laura, playing at being a normal family. He had disapproved of the implication. 

"You don't think it's something of a conflict of interest?" he'd asked Dee. "The civilian and military leaders…" He'd waved a hand in the air, as though refusing to finish the sentence would make it not so, as though he were an embarrassed child.

Dee had laughed and caught his hand in mid-air. "I think it's sweet," she'd replied. "And don't they have a right to be happy?"

He's not sure people do have a right to be happy. There are few rights left and surely happiness, when it comes, is fleeting and uncertain, a half-remembered shadow to snatch at in the moments before death. Perhaps a privilege, or a painful reminder of another life, but not a right. He's not sure he'd call his father and Laura happy, anyway. They hold each other up and together hold the weight of the world; it's an effective partnership, but hardly a model for happily ever after.

That dinner was cancelled—some crisis he can't recall—and there was never another. But sometimes when he's in their quarters, trying to ignore the heavy, sticky stench of illness and alcohol, he imagines the cancelled dinner: his own too-polite aloofness would dissolve a little as Dee told a wry story about the sexual misadventures of some crewman or other. The president would double over in giggles and grip Dee's shoulder for support as Lee and his father shared a look of contented pride. Sometimes Lee hates that he doesn't even have the memory; sometimes he thinks it would be harder if he did.

Laura returns into the front part of the cabin alone, wearing loose-fitting exercise clothes instead of her suit, her wig exchanged for a soft, green scarf. She sinks into a chair and gestures for him to take the one opposite. Lee hates how small she looks. 

"Bill does not want Baltar's people patrolling this ship. Nor does he want Cylons patrolling this ship. Nor does he want anarchy among the civilian population." She sighs.

"I can't say I disagree with him," Lee replies.

"Oh, I completely agree with him in theory," Laura says. "In practice, however, we must do something."

Anyone else, he thinks, would have used the passive voice: "something must be done." But even now, Laura commands language decisively, the plural pronoun her only concession to shared responsibility. Lee has made enough hard choices by this point to be confident in his leadership abilities, but he continues to envy her comfort in the position. 

"The smartest of the various wrong decisions?" he asks with a grin he's sure doesn't reach his eyes.

"Something like that, yes." Her own smile is genuine, amused, and perhaps a little indulgent. He can imagine her in the classroom with that expression, encouraging students who vie to win her approval. Lee had those teachers, the ones he would do anything to please and dazzle, the ones he was so loathe to disappoint. Sometimes he fears that his relationship with Laura is little more than this familiar pedagogical dynamic writ large.

He sighs, focusing instead on the problem at hand. "The people are already upset enough about Cylons on this ship, Cylons with amnesty. I think Baltar may be right—arming the Cylons would cause a revolution."

She nods slightly. "I'm afraid you're right about that."

"Afraid?" Lee responds sharply. "Surely you don't want the Cylons keeping order on _Galactica_."

"Of course not." She picks at a loose thread in the hem of her sweatshirt, and he tries not to notice how badly her hands shake. "But you forged us a truce, Lee, and the people need to learn to live with that."

"You can't expect them to forgive. The Colonies. New Caprica. They won't just forget what the Cylons have done."

She laughs suddenly, sharp and clear and tinged with irony. "It wasn't so long ago that you and I were having a very similar debate in a courtroom. We seem to be arguing different sides now."

He still thinks of her on that witness stand, sometimes. He's never loved or hated her more than he did in that moment. 

"You were right at the trial, Lee," she continues. "Your closing remarks. I was—" she pauses, her lips twisting into a not-quite smile. He sees muted anger and regret in her face, but also wistful pride; he suspects she both loved and hated him back then, as well. "I was very angry at the time," she continues, "but you were right. We don't have room for vengeance. Not now."

"Yet we executed Zarek and Gaeta. We jailed the other mutineers," Lee counters. "We can't claim everyone is forgiven—even the Cylons, especially the Cylons—and then not forgive our own people."

Laura narrows her eyes. "You agreed with the decision. Why?"

Lee is speechless for a moment. They had all agreed—his father, Laura, Tigh. He thought the reason was obvious. "They committed mutiny. They killed our own people. They tried to kill you, my father, me, all of us."

As he looks at her, he feels like the student who has gotten the wrong answer. Her face is tired and sad, and he doesn't know how to take back whatever he's said or done to cause it. 

"I need you to understand this, Lee," she says slowly. "Everything I have done since the day you and I met— _everything_ —I have done for one reason only: to keep these people, my people, safe and alive. That is my measuring stick, and I think you will find it consistent." 

She breaks off, coughing, and Lee gets up to pour her some water. When he holds the glass a little too long in handing it to her, she casts him a withering look and somehow wills her hands not to shake as she drinks. 

"The mutineers," she resumes, "were not executed and jailed because they tried to kill us but because they were a danger to the safety of the fleet."

Lee does believe her, and he thinks he almost understands. He fidgets under her gaze and begins to pace. On one of the bookshelves he sees a photograph he hasn't noticed before, a candid shot of Laura and his father, arm in arm, leaving the dance floor on that first and only Colonial Day, nearly four years ago. They're smiling, but with the benefit of hindsight Lee thinks he can see the cloud of dubiously ethical choices already hanging about them. He didn't see it at the time.

Lee was there when she made her first impossible decision, to leave behind the ships without FTL capability. He agreed with that decision, but he had not at the time recognized it for what it was: the drawing up of a utilitarian calculus against which she would proceed to weigh every subsequent choice.

"Okay," he finally answers, turning around to face her again. "I see that, yes." He can't tell if she believes him. "But the people don't. The people don't understand that you think they're safer right now in the hands of the Cylons than in the hands of all those officers who are locked up on the _Astral Queen_. They still hate the Cylons. They fear them. They want revenge. And now the same Cylons who destroyed our homes and killed everyone we ever knew are walking free in our fleet."

"And why is that?" she interjects sharply.

He doesn't reply.

"Lee," she continues, her voice now warm and encouraging, "you made the right decision when you forged this alliance. It was a crisis, it required swift action, and you found the path that keeps the fleet safest, that gets us all closer—" She stops, purses her lips, swallows. "That keeps the human race alive." She beckons him to take his seat again, and he complies. "That was good. But you can't have it both ways. You can't forge an alliance one day and throw our allies in the brig the next. You can't make unilateral and unpopular decisions for the people's own good and then expect to turn around and submit to the people's will."

"Aren't we still aiming to be a democracy?" he counters instinctively. "Isn't submitting to the people's will what we're here to do?" Even as he says them, the words feel false.

"This society has not been a democracy for a very long time," she answers, her voice once again indulgent, chipping gently away at the last of his remaining ideals. This, he realizes, is her idea of training him to be her successor. "We have, as a wise man once said, become a gang, on the run, improvising, making our own laws."

He opens his mouth, then closes it, not sure how to respond to his own words thrown back at him like this. He wants to argue that this wasn't what he meant when he made that speech in the courtroom, that he never meant for his words to implicate him in these decisions he hates in his gut. Yet he can't fault her logic, and he sees now that his complicity with this leadership began on the day the world ended.

Laura gives him a sad smile. "I'm not a president like Richard Adar was a president," she says, "and you won't be, either. We're dictators, gang leaders. We have made and will make decisions that four years ago we would have found unthinkable. I would rather sacrifice ideals for people than to be like Tom Zarek and sacrifice people for ideals."

She's growing tired: her voice slurs slightly, despite its conviction, and her hands shake so badly she no longer attempts to drink her water. Lee wonders how she can be so full of life and so near death, so worthy of his adoration and his simultaneous abhorrence. She is wrong by every standard he has ever believed in, yet she is unassailably, terrifyingly right. He doesn't think he'll be able to do this without her.

"Do you really think we should follow through on the alliance? Get Cylons to provide security on _Galactica_?" He dreads her reply.

"No," she answers quickly. "Baltar is right: the people are angry. They would never accept it, and we would have a revolution on our hands. I don't like Gaius Baltar, and I don't trust him, but I'm afraid his proposal is the best option we have available to us at the moment. Do you agree?"

"I…yes." The proposal is laughable, impossible, yet among the choices, of course he agrees. He thought he had come to this conclusion before she did, but now he suspects she had made up her mind before Baltar left the room, and that this entire conversation has been some kind of object lesson rather than a process of mutual deliberation. 

"That's settled, then," she says. "I'll tell Bill to give the order in the morning."

She unfolds her hands and tries to brace against the chair arms to stand. Lee jumps up. "Here, Madam President, let me." She had resisted his aid with the water, but he knows how much this conversation has exhausted her when she gives him her hand, thin and ice-cold, and allows him to help her to stand. He keeps an arm around her as they cross into the sleeping area. He can hear his father snoring softly in the shadows.

"Thank you," she says, a little self-consciously.

"Of course," he replies. He wants to tell her that there is very little he wouldn't do for her if she asked. He hopes she knows this.

"And Lee," she adds as he starts to move away, "you'll do very well by our people."


End file.
